Category Archives: history

Dear Friends,
we’re not quite sure what happened with that last year, and if anybody has seen it, please let us know. In the meantime, we are proud to return from our involuntary hiatus with a splendid new issue – mono.kultur #40, no less – with the wonderful British ceramicist, artist and writer Edmund de Waal.
Edmund [...]

The 66th edition of the venerable Berlinale Film Festival is upon us, and it will feature an exclusive retrospective of the work of cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who, besides working for the likes of Rainer Fassbinder or Martin Scorsese, has also graced the cover of our humble publication with mono.kultur #19.
The legendary gentleman with a camera [...]

The first magazine to commission me in Germany was fashion and music magazine Style & the Family Tunes, at the time Berlin’s answer to i-D or Dazed & Confused. Launched in the mid-1990s, it survived a whopping 17 years in which the media landscape irrefutably began to transform, leaving Style amidst its wreckage. Few genres [...]

As the holiday season is coming to an end, we are still looking for reasons to stay or even to go back to some of our favorite spots this summer. Cyprus for instance has not only a multilayered history, but also an eclectic contemporary art scene. Part of it is Neoterismoi Toumazou, a former novelty [...]

The German blockbuster-directer Roland Emmerich has just released a trailer for his new movie Stonewall, and it’s been already discussed controversially, particularly about its lack of authenticity. Just to quickly recap: The Stonewall Riots were a series of protests in 1969 against the police by the LGBT community in New York after a police raid in [...]

Christian Kracht’s book Imperium has been considered as a “Melvillean masterpiece of the South Seas” recently. Released in Germany in 2012, it has now been translated into English by Daniel Bowes.
The protagonist of the fiction is August Engelhardt, a “nudist and cocovore”, who purchases land in what was then German New Guinea, in order to [...]

Last night opened the exhibition Fashion Stories, curated by Wolfgang Tillmans at his Between Bridges space, showcasing a broad range of fashion photography from the 2980s and ’90s. More than that, it is a hommage to street style magazines such as i-D or The Face that proved so influential for generations of image and fashion [...]

Terre Thaemlitz has commented on the changes to Japan’s controversial Fuueihou law via a statement on her website. The post responds to the “Declaration On the Future Of Japan’s Club Culture”, signed by 40 Japanese DJs on the same day that the 67-year-old law was officially changed by the Japanese government. She argues that it has “no purpose other than [...]

Besides the well-known Greek mythology, Mesopotamia hides epics consisting of several myths. The Epic of Gılgamesh from Ancient Mesopotamia, is one of them which is written in Sumerian and Assyrian. As the first written language in the world, Sumerian has no reminiscence to any language in the world.
Apparently, the well known stories in the Bible, Torah [...]

One of the changes in the world considering the post-war period in 1920s was the rapid modernisation in Turkey, as a result of a new republic, which originally started in the last 50 years of the Ottoman Empire.
In Facts and Fantasies: Images of Istanbul Women in the 1920s, Fatma Türe writes about the rediscovery of [...]